THE EVOLUTION OF SMALL SCALE MINING IN MT. DIWALWAL
The gold deposit in a portion of Mt. Diwata where small scale mining later flourished was discovered on September 23, 1983 by a group of gold panners led by Camilo “Kamini” Banad, a Mansaka from Naboc, a lowland rice-producing barangay of Monkayo. The group accordingly started prospecting for gold from the lowland portion of Naboc river and explored uphill until reaching atop Mt. Diwata.
It was in the specific area later dubbed as Balite (after the wood specie abundant in the surrounding) that the group recovered plentiful supply of free gold, some nuggets of which could be easily picked by hands. The gold occurrences actually resulted from the crushed gold veins and orebodies, which were struck during the PICOP’s road expansion traversing the upper portion of Balite in the middle of 1981.
The supposed gold discovery was not known by the company’s logging personnel. For about eight months, Banad and his group clandestinely operated in the area. In due time the group returned to their village, awash with money to splurge, thus later making their co-villagers curious over their means of income.
No sooner they were tailed by their co-villagers to the highlands. In one merrymaking at the village a member of the group was said to have recklessly bared their trade secret among villagers.
Another account narrated that Mt. Diwata’s gold discovery was later divulged in public when the local police questioned a member of the group, who was suspected to be a member of a syndicate for his heavy drinking and gambling.
Shortly thereafter the news on the abundant gold deposits up in Mt. Diwata spread like a wildfire via word-of-mouth in neighboring rural villages, towns and cities. The gold rush thus began. At first the human rush took the existing PICOP road, but the company shortly restricted passage. The move caused gold prospectors to take difficult alternative routes, such as thickly forested cliffs and slippery heights. They trekked for about six hours through high slopes towards Mt. Diwata mountains, having an elevation of over 2,000 feet above sea level. It was such tortuous maneuver of opportunity seekers to reach the gold-rich Mt. Diwata that led to the monicker (Mt.) Diwalwal, a vernacular which means protrusion of tongue. The gold rush in Mt. Diwata took off and shortly, it gained national and international attention. (Police blotter)
Just before the human rush came in the area, Banad’s group and few others that managed to locate the place recovered gold basically through the panning technology. Pioneering groups worked their way by draining down through the river the crushed earth from cliffs and mountainsides known to contain gold deposits.
However, at the broader start of Mt. Diwata’s gold rush, resource recovery inevitably took a chaotic form. As population rushed in, intense squabbles over mineable areas took place. In their frantic search for gold, they panned and dug shallow pits, holes and tunnels anywhere within Mt. Diwata range- along a river and its tributaries and in skidding mountain ridges. Hard rock mining or underground tunnelling inevitably came to its being.
Pioneer diggings and tunnels were however most concentrated in areas where gold veins were earlier struck. In those areas, groups operated closely adjacent to each other. No sooner settlements and service establishments were formed along the road, concentrating around productive tunnels and stretching in a six-kilometer distance towards the gold-rich Balite area. The once forested area was ultimately transformed into a bustling small scale mining area.
In the earliest years of mass exploration, when pits and tunnels were still shallow, Mt. Diwata’s gold operation took a collectivist mode, as it was usually done by a group of friends, villagemates or kins. Altogether they pooled their limited resources for food and material supplies and collectively shared manual labor.
After hitting the gold vein, the proceeds would be first used to refund the expenses incurred by member/s, then allocated to food and material supplies for the next round of operation before the net proceeds would be equally shared by the members. Another scheme had the participation of financier/s who would first be refunded of his/their expenses before an equal sharing would be made.
A group of purely manual workers or of financier/s and manual laborers was then popularly labelled as “corpo”, which presumably had the collective control or rights to exploit for more gold when mineralization occurred underground. At the earliest, when some tunnels started producing gold, a group’s control over a particular productive group could be wrested by another group, especially following cave-ins and landslides that destroyed and covered tunnel portals.
Thereafter new squabbles took place among groups digging up new portals and racing to catch up the underground area where gold veins had last been known. Between 1983 to 1984, tunnels were also often ransacked by armed men holding up the operating group at bay. Devoid of formal rules and the presence of the government in the wilds, the rowdy situation had inevitably led many miners to arm themselves, giving Diwalwal some people’s monicker “Little Texas” or “Wild,Wild West”, reflective from foreign cowboy films, depicting scenarios where the barrel of the gun counted most in one’s survival. Thus, control over mineralized areas was largely a tough-guy engagement between and among groups.
As tunnels and their adits, locally known as destinos, reached further depths following the routes of various of gold veins and gold-bearing orebodies, new operations from different portals and their adits tried to compete and share in bigger mineralized areas underground. When latter operations came across with gold disseminations and mineralized fissures, they concentrated on areas having high potentials for gold content, knowing later they ended up traversing to passages of other operations or going to current explorations of other groups.
On the otherhand, other latter tunnels which hit separate high-grade orebodies would also be approached by existing underground players (dubbed as hangering). In using a rule of the thumb, “follow the vein principle” in various speed (dependent on the corpo’s financing, manpower and technology), tunnels ended up crisscrossing on top and sideways of each other, defying critical distances in mining standards and sparking inter-group conflicts.
Mt. Diwata’s small scale mining fitted to the process described in a study of Philippine Council for Health Research and Development, thus: “(Tunnels or adits) are shallow underground workings without defined standard mining method. The direction of the adits or tunnels is dictated by dip, strike and thickness of the veins and the concentration of gold values in the rocks.
Sizes of tunnels are often just enough for a person to crawl in. For loose ground, timber is used to support the workings. Distances between workings depend on the stability of the ground and the grade of the ore. Where high grade ore is found, tunnels are driven very close to each other resulting in the weakening of the pillars and eventual collapse of the workings. Between 5-10 miners work at a time in one adit per shift... Ores are placed (then) placed in sacks of 40-45 kgs. And carried manually to the surface and then to the (millers) for processing.
(In gold processing), ores extracted from mine workings is initially crushed manually using sledge hammer. The crushed materials are fed to the rod mill and ground for 3 to 4 hours. The ground pulp is discharged from the mill and passed to the sluice box for gravity concentration. This process collects concentrate containing the free gold along heavy materials. The tailings or waste are collected for further treatment.
The concentrate is then further ground for one and half hours using handmills. Mercury is then added and the materials are amalgamated for 30 minutes. The amalgamated pulp is discharged and the mercury-amalgam portion is then pressed through a fine cloth thereby obtaining the amalgam. This is cleaned with the use of a soap and further squeezed through the cloth to remove the excess mercury. (The amalgam is then smelted using a blowtorch releasing the mercury to the atmosphere, and thus what remains is gold).”
The foregoing process was intensive in Mt. Diwata between 1985 to mid-1989, about two years after the discovery and before the worst cave-in disaster in Balite area on May 30, 1989. In the beginning, panning and handmill processing had been used, when power generating set was still too scarce in the mining area.
By 1985 a bigger power generator had been brought up to service several tunnels and establishments in the area. Thus, other profitable operators followed suit, resulting to changes in mining technology. Shortly, the use of candles for underground illumination was replaced by flourescents and bulbs. Handmills were subsumed by ballmills- fabricated gold processing equipment having bigger lode capacity. Blowers were used to pump air to underground depths. Manual jetmatic pumps used for flushing out underground water were later replaced by electricity-run submersible pumps.
By mid-85, the viability of several tunnel operations in Mt. Diwata was evident in the start of progressive technological innovation, management and technical staffing, backward and forward linkages of several tunnel operations in the area. Except for the Blucor Minerals Corporation co-managed by local capitalists of Chinese descent, which operated tapping the style of corporate mining and the services of technical men, several competing viable tunnel operations evolved their own management structures and technological innovations. From a simple management-labor claim-and-share structure, new functions in the work chain had been introduced, while ore production increased.
In terms of manpower, the number of underground miners depended in the number of destinos (adits) and on the chosen hour-shift, which consisted of 8, 10 or 12 hours of continuous mine works depending on the physical capability of the contracting team. At the average, the entire underground work process, from gold extraction to delivery of the ores at the surface required about 30 to 40 manpower.
For the underground work, mine workers would be led by their team leaders to work on destinos respectively assigned to them by the management. Team leaders were the organizers who contracted with the tunnel management for a mine work on shift basis. They were responsible for the food supply and work monitoring for the mine workers.
After the shift they usually shared 50 percent of the bags of ores produced, after deducting 10 percent for the underground road toll, 5 percent each for the power generator and submersible pumps. The other underground workers compensated by the management at various average shares were as follows: underground supervisor, having a share of 10-20 bags per week; and head timberman, 10 bags per set, a term referred to a distance of underground excavation. Sharing with him were the 3-4 timbermen.
Later as adits went deeper, tunnel inspectors were deployed to conduct regular check on the status of the workings. Under him were the phase or destino guards deployed in all exit points and destinos underground to watch out for sneakers from other tunnels and disallowed highgrading activities. At the surface, workers employed were the 4 to 6 portal guards sharing 4 bags a week and a stock segregator, getting 3 bags per week.
As gold extraction went deeper and the grade of ore becoming lower, Mt. Diwata’s mode of gold production and processing changed with the introduction of sophisticated power tools, dynamites and cynidation plants.
Technological changes intensively occurred in the years following the most disastrous cave-in at the Balite area on May 30, 1989. The disaster badly devastated Balite’s underground, residential and commercial structures and left scores of thousands of casualties. As gold production ground to a halt, Mt. Diwata’s population estimated to have reached 80,000 during the 1987 –1988 boom period eventually thinned out.
In the next three years tunnel operators and claimants had frustratingly conducted rehabilitation efforts as they were frequently met with smaller cave-ins and landslides especially during continuous rains. A bigger fire in nearby Patindol area struck in 1991, which further interrupted the rehabilitation.
So dilapidated was the underground structures and portal structures of Balite that it was too risky to carry the ore stocks going up to the surface using the upper portals. Eventually, a group of tunnel operators moved to lower grounds and agreed to use a common portal through which they could reach their respective tunnel and adit networks.
Forced by the dilapidated and high-risk underground workings, the need for passageways to catch up the vein last struck before the disaster and the need to pool resources altogether to gain from economies of scale vis-à-vis the high capitalization for deeper mining and low-grade gold ores, smaller tunnel operations grouped – a move challenging bigger and corporatist mining operations.
The new set-up resulted to interlocking claim and sharing schemes based on one’s quality and quantity of the past tunnel and claims, importance of passageways, capital participation, degree of rehabilitation efforts and stakes on processing plants and equipment. While other smaller operations opted to sell their claims, new corpos found their way to have stakes in Balite through technical expertise, new financing, loyalty and connections.
In the late 1992 mining activities resumed but under a different scheme. The rehabilitation saw new tunnelling arrangement, technological innovation, work chain and sharing scheme. The underground area was delineated vertically downward, “tonton system” which was based of agreed old claims and networks, replacing the free-for-all claim system based on “follow the vein” principle.
In the past, the latter often resulted to indiscriminate tunnelling, encroachment and hangering activities, as tunnels batted for speed in their operations without much regard to leaving natural and fortified timberings and to the status and directions of other operations. As a result, tunnelling conflicts often broke out and unsafe underground workings were formed.
Evidently, small mining operations in Mt. Diwata after the disaster underwent technological modifications, buttressed by the entry of technical men, several of whom were formerly employed with big mining companies. Steel tramcars rolling through wooden tracks with a capacity to load 30 half-sack ores (at an average of 40 kilos per half sack) were introduced, as the main passageway was enlarged into 12 feet in height by 8 feet in width, thus eliminating the crawling in the egress and exit of mine workers in the past. Gold recovery has been maximized with the use of mini and big carbon-in-pulp (CIP) or cynidation plants and dynamite blasting, co-existing with the ballmills and the traditional manual operations.
Under the new set-up, two types of mine workers emerged: miners in manual operation and miners in dynamite blasting operation. For manual operation, a team usually composed of seven to eight miners work in adits by a six-hour shift, which maybe extended depending on the underground status.
Added in the work chain are the “trammers” (workers who transport the ores to the surface using tramcars), who would be paid in cash by the team per trip, and the “resackers” (surface workers who re-sack mixed ores before the stock sharing), per ore bag. Stock sharing for various supplies (like power, submersible pumps, sacks) and for various operation and staffing functions in lower management level were mostly eliminated. Instead, management staff are usually paid in salaries.
Stock sharing is shortened to labor-management ratio, after deduction of 10 percent for the portal toll. Supporting the underground workers are the underground supervisor, electrician and timbermen, who are either paid in salaries or per ore bag. For the blasting operation, which usually has four shifts in a day, a team of seven to eight workers work in “beat”, contiguous mine out areas bigger than the adits.
A team is usually composed of the team leader or beat supervisor, “blasters” , “sackers”, laborers, helpers trammers and re-sackers. Stock sharing scheme between the management and the team varies depending on the arrangement and status of underground areas, although the portal toll and the costs for the use of tramcar are of the same terms as in manual operations.
